ABSTRACT
Although an independent Russian state had emerged in 1991, the task now was not only to provide that state with sinews and muscle, a process that we
have discussed in earlier chapters, but for that state to create a nation. Charles Tilly and others have long argued that states make war, and wars make states, but another no less important process from the nineteenth century onwards was the way that disparate peoples were forged into nations by states.2 The failure of the Russian Empire to achieve this is one reason for the collapse in 1917,3 and in a paradoxical way the Soviet state also failed ultimately in its nation-building efforts.4 Where autocracy and communism had failed, could a democratic Russia now forge a nation-state out of its over one hundred nationalities, four main traditional religions and enormously diverse climatic conditions in the world’s largest territorial agglomeration? As Ernest Renan put it, a nation is constituted by ‘the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories’ accompanied by ‘present-day consent, the desire to live together’. For the past not to become the source of conflict, since the many communities ‘each has its own memories’ with little in common, Renan argued that a nation is forged as much by what is forgotten as what is remembered. At the same time, he insisted ‘a nation’s existence is . . . a daily plebiscite’. In other words, the past can be both the basis of unity as well as division; and ultimately the peoples making up a nation must want to live together.5 As Putin noted in his Millennium Manifesto,
The fruitful and creative work, which our country needs so badly, is impossible in a split and internally disintegrated society, a society where the main social sections and political forces do not share basic values and fundamental ideological orientations. Twice in the outgoing century Russia has found itself in such a state: after October 1917 and in the 1990s.6
